Several very primitive societies such as the Sentinelese and the Jarawa still populate the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean and continue to this day to live in a "Stone Age existence."

"It is not certain whether, outside the Andaman Islands, there still exists any community that has had as little contact with civilization as the Sentinelese. Pandit and his colleagues say there is none. Several American anthropologists I have spoken to agree with them" (Goodheart).

They have thus far aggressively resisted all attempts at contact by modern people and explorers (killing several people with arrows). The tsunami in 2004 once again focused attention on them.

I got this from a forum and thought it may be relevant to what's discussed here.

Swamy

â€˜Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese, is an unique project beingled by Dr. Anvita Abbi, Professor of Linguistics at the Jawaharlal NehruUniversity to study the language of this threatened community. It hasbeen suggested that the Andamanese languages might be the lastrepresentative of South East Asia's ancient pre-Neolithic languages.

Dr. Abbiâ€™s project has created considerably new understanding of theGreat Andamanese community â€“ giving us a descriptive grammar of thelanguage, a socio-linguistic description, an archive of their folklore,oral texts and video recordings and also a trilingual dictionary. â€œThebiggest breakthrough,â€ says Dr. Abbi, â€œis that we been able to identifythe Great Andamanse as the Sixth language family of India while Onge andJarawa (the other two indigenous communities of the Andamans) constitutea different family altogether. No other Indian language has even aslight resemblance to the verb structures of the Great Andamanese langauge."

Another aspect of the language that fascinates Dr. Abbi is itsterminology of the body. â€œThe body,â€ she explains, â€œis divided into fourbasic zones. These are (1) the mouth and its semantic extension (2) themajor external body parts (3) the extreme ends of the body like toe andfingernails etc and (4) the bodily products. A detailed study of thepossessive constructions in Great Andamanese shows that ethnoanatomy andkinship share the same level of categorization and there is a parallelbetween certain body parts and kin relations.â€

In the language therefore there is a parallel between major body partsof an individual and his/her spouse. Similarly parents and youngersiblings are compared to oneâ€™s mouth cavity whereas a child and sweatare both considered products from the body.

Time is categorized as the honey calendar which is itself based on thename of the blooming flowers at that particular time. Honey,significantly occupies a special place in the pattern of subsistence andmovement of the Great Andamanese and also the other communities like theOnge of Little Andaman Island.

An excellent benchmark of the status of a people is the status of theirlanguage; the converse is just as true and we get an excellentillustration of this when we look at the Great Andamanese people. â€œOnlyfour of the original Great Andamanese languages are spoken today,â€ saysDr. Abbi and â€œthere are only a handful of these people who can speaktheir ancestoral language today.â€ The number was eight a few months agoand is now down to six with the passing away of two of them. Thelanguage and the people are both on the brink.

This is quite interesting, thank you. I will look up Dr. Abbi's research. This is really one of the last chances we'll have to study a group that is perhaps still much earlier in the transition process.

I think you mean Detroit - but there might be a tribe like that in the Amazon too.

But seriously, how would it be possible to test such a thing? It seems to me that the testing alone would alter their perceptions - much like subatomic particles in quantum physics. Observation is enough to skew the results. If there are bicameral people in our day and age, this state of mind would be a fragile affair indeed. As has been said about the Amazon natives, "light a match in front of him and you've ruined his world view" or something to that effect.

Rather, it bring up the fact that the PirahÃ£s lack temporal organization - and pretty much live in the present (according to Everett, they also have "no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for â€œall,â€ â€œeach,â€ â€œevery,â€ â€œmost,â€ or â€œfewâ€â€”terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition"):

Rather, it bring up the fact that the PirahÃ£s lack temporal organization - and pretty much live in the present (according to Everett, they also have "no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for â€œall,â€ â€œeach,â€ â€œevery,â€ â€œmost,â€ or â€œfewâ€â€”terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition"):

The tribesman is sitting in a boat. Is it his boat? If so, how did he acquire it and why? He's wearing shorts. How and why did he acquire those? The article states that some in the tribe were conspiring to kill the missionary. I don't understand how a conspiracy is possible without an understanding of "future", nor do I understand the motivation for such a conspiracy without an understanding of "past".

The last member of the Bo tribe (Great Andamanese) died wiping out the language and an entire tribe from the face of the earth. In this news clip, there's mention of her hearing (voices?) 'the eldest of us' during the Asian tsunami of 2004 which she survived. Dr. Abbi had close contacts with her and can be contacted for more details.